A New Mexico Court judge on Thursday ordered Meta to pay a fine of $567 million, on top of the $375 million levied in March, in a case regarding social media harms and addiction. This brings the total fines the company has to pay to $942 million.
The court also ordered Meta to make changes to how its platforms function in the state: It wants the company to remove Like counts, and only show such…
Ex-Spotify employees raise $10M to bring the AI behind its recommendations to e-commerce
August 7, 2026
Sidd Motwani, Ian Anderson, and Shivaditya Sinha spent years building the behavioral intelligence infrastructure behind Spotify’s recommendation engine. Called Vector AI, the system is designed to predict a person’s intent and next actions instead of relying only…
Google announced on Thursday that Google Maps’ “Ask Maps” feature is gaining a slew of new agentic capabilities, including the ability to order food, book hotels, and find event tickets. The tech giant is also bringing Personal Intelligence to Ask Maps…
The customer support industry has seen a massive influx of startups like Sierra, Decagon, and Parloa trying to infuse AI into automating customer calls, chat, and messages so companies can handle more queries at scale.
But according to Athens-based Omilia, which has been working on automating voice calls and customer support since 2002, throwing AI at every process can be wasteful. The…
Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup.
Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer…
E-commerce software maker Shopify seems to be benefiting handily from people using AI to search.
On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a “complement to search, rather than a substitute for…
The new deep learning techniques behind LLMs have also given us weather simulations that can run on laptops instead of supercomputers, changing meteorology. But the bigger task for AI may be making it easier for people and organizations to put those forecasts to work.
WindBorne Systems, a startup that collects data with the world’s longest-flying weather balloons and feeds it into a powerful…
Apple is now seeking a preliminary injunction in its trade secrets case against OpenAI, which aims to stop the AI model maker from moving forward with developing an AI device or other products based on Apple’s technology. The iPhone maker also claims that more of its…
On Tuesday, AI infrastructure company Runware announced the launch of its own modular data center called Sonic Inference Pod. Designed as a single transportable unit, the Pod represents a more flexible kind of compute that can sit alongside hyperscalers’ massive data…
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless…
